The early history of the Hebrews

by A. H. Sayce

The country in which Harran was built formed part of the vast tract between the Tigris and Euphrates, which was known to the Babylonians in early days as Suru or Suri, a name which perhaps survived in that of the city Suru, the Suriyeh of modern geography. In Semitic times it was called Subari or Suwari by the Assyrians, sometimes also Subartu. Suru thus corresponded with our Mesopotamia, though it seems to have included a part of Northern Syria as well. But to the district in which Harran stood the Babylonians gave a more special name. It was Padan or Padin, ‘the cultivated plain,’ of which it is said in a cuneiform tablet that it lies ‘in front of the mountains of the Aramæans,’[^[21]] while an early Babylonian sovereign entitles himself king of Padan as well as of Northern Babylonia.[^[22]] The name bore witness to the fertility of the country to which it was applied. The Babylonian lexicographers make padan a synonym of words signifying ‘field’ and ‘garden’; it was, in fact, originally the piece of ground which a yoke of oxen could plough in a given period of time. Hence it came to mean an ‘acre,’ a sense which still survives in the Arabic feddân. The Babylonian leases and sales of land which were drawn up in the Abrahamic age repeatedly describe the ‘feddans’ or ‘acres’ of which the property consists. The fertile plain of Mesopotamia, accordingly, was not a plain merely; it was also ‘the field’ or ‘acre’ of Aram where the Semites of the Aramæan stock ploughed and harvested their corn.[^[23]]

In Egyptian its name was Naharina. The name had been borrowed from the Aramæans, who called their country the land of Naharain, ‘the two rivers.’ In Canaan, as we know from the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna, it bore the Canaanitish form of Naharaim, Nahrima, the final nasal of the Aramaic dialects becoming m. Aram-Naharaim was thus the Egyptian and Canaanitish title of the country which the Babylonian spoke of as Padan Arman, ‘Padan of the Aramæans.’ Both names go back to the age before the Israelitish Exodus out of Egypt; the one belongs to Egypt and Palestine, the other to Babylonia.

Before the age of the Exodus, however, the Aramæan population of Mesopotamia became the subjects of a people who seem to have come from the north. Mitanni, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, not far from the modern Birejik, became the capital of a kingdom which extended over Naharaim on the one side, and to the neighbourhood of the Orontes on the other. The race which founded the kingdom spoke a language unlike any other with which we are acquainted; it was, however, agglutinative, and exhibits certain general resemblances to some of the languages of the Caucasus. From the sixteenth century B.C. onwards, Mitanni and Naharaim are synonymous terms, even though, at times, the Egyptian scribes still observed the old distinction between them; even though also, it may be, Naharaim had a larger meaning than Mitanni. But the kings of Mitanni were vigorous and powerful. In the age of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence we find them intriguing with the Hittites and Babylonians in the Egyptian province of Canaan, and Ramses III. of the twentieth Egyptian dynasty still counts the people of Mitanni among his enemies. At an earlier date the royal families of Egypt and Mitanni had intermarried with one another, and the marriages had introduced new ideas and a revolutionary policy into the ancient monarchy of the Nile. When the kingdom of Mitanni had been founded we do not know. There is no trace of it in the earlier records of Babylonia, and we may safely say that it arose long after the era of Khammu-rabi and Abram.[^[24]]

Terah, we are told, died in Harran, and there Nahor, his second son, remained to dwell. Terah and Nahor are names which we look for in vain elsewhere in the Old Testament or in the inscriptions of Babylonia. And yet light has been thrown upon them by the cuneiform texts. Tablets have been found in Cappadocia, written in archaic cuneiform characters and in a dialect of Assyrian, which are at least as old as the the of the Tel el-Amarna letters; according to some scholars, they are coeval with the dynasty of Khammu-rabi. In one of these tablets we find the word, or name, Nakhur; what its signification may be, we cannot, unfortunately, tell; all we can be sure of is that it was known to the Semitic inhabitants of eastern Cappadocia, not far from the Aramæan border.[^[25]] The name of Terah points in the same direction, Tarkhu was a god whose name enters into the composition of Cappadocian and North-Syrian princes; he was worshipped by the Hittites, and so belongs to the same region as that in which we have found the name of Nahor.

But neither Tarkhu nor Nakhur is Aramaic in the usual sense of the term. Both seem to belong to that mixed dialect which has been revealed to us by German excavation at Sinjerli, north of the Gulf of Antioch, and about which scholars have disputed whether to call it Hebraised Aramaic or Aramaised Hebrew. At any rate, it is a dialect which, though Aramaic in origin, has been profoundly influenced by ‘the language of Canaan.’ It bears witness to the existence of a Hebrew-speaking population in that part of the world. It would be rash to affirm that this population already existed there in patriarchal days, though words which seem to be of Hebrew origin are met with in the Cappadocian tablets. But we now know that Northern Syria was once the meeting-place of the northern Semitic languages; that here they mingled with one another and with other languages which were not Semitic in type, and that here alone, outside the pages of the Old Testament, are the names of Terah and Nahor to be found.[^[26]]

Nahor remained in Harran, but Abram moved on still further to the West. The road was well known to his contemporaries, and probably followed the later line of march which led past Carchemish, now Jerablûs, Aleppo, and Hamath. From Hamath southward the land was in the possession of the Amorites. Their chief seat was immediately to the north of the Palestine of later days, but they had already occupied large portions of the territory to the south of them as far as the Dead Sea and the limits of the cultivated land. They had been for many centuries the dominant people of the West. Already in the time of Sargon of Akkad they had given their name among the Babylonians to Central Syria and Canaan. The name, indeed, goes back to the pre-Semitic days of Babylonian history. What the Semites called the land of the Amurrâ or Amorites, the Sumerians had termed Martu. And the two names, Amurrâ and Martu, continued to designate Syria and Palestine almost to the latest epoch of Babylonian political life.

The monuments of Egypt have shown us what these Amorites were like. They belonged to the blond race, like the Libyans of Northern Africa. At Abu-Simbel their skins are painted yellow—the Egyptian equivalent of white—their eyes blue, and the beard and eyebrows red. At Medînet Habu the skin, as Professor Flinders Petrie expresses it, is ‘rather pinker than flesh-colour,’ while in a tomb of the eighteenth dynasty at Thebes it is painted white, the eyes and hair being a light red-brown. At Karnak the names of the places captured by Thothmes III. in Palestine are surmounted by the figures of Amorites whose skin is alternately red and yellow, the red denoting sunburn, the yellow what we term white. In features the Amorites belonged to the Indo-European type. The nose was straight and regular, the forehead high, the lips thin, and the cheek-bones somewhat prominent, while they wore whiskers and a pointed beard. So far as we can judge from the representations of the Egyptian artists, they belonged to a dolichocephalic or long-headed race.[^[27]]

That they were tall in stature we know from the Old Testament. By the side of them the Hebrew spies described themselves as grasshoppers. The cities they built were strong and ‘walled up to heaven’; the thick walls of one of them have been disinterred on the site of Lachish by Professor Petrie and Mr. Bliss. But though the Babylonians continued to include Canaan in the general term, ‘land of the Amorites,’ and spoke of the Canaanite himself as an ‘Amorite,’ they nevertheless came to know that there was a distinction between them. The Babylonian king, Burna-buryas, whose letters to the Egyptian Pharaoh have been found at Tel el-Amarna, distinguishes Kinakhkhi or Canaan from the land of the Amorites, which had come to be confined to the country immediately to the north of Palestine. From the seventeenth century B.C. downwards, Amorite and Canaanite cease to be synonymous terms. It is only in certain parts of the Pentateuch that the old Babylonian use of the name ‘Amorite’ still survives.

It was a use that never prevailed among the Assyrians. When Assyria became a kingdom, and its rulers first led their armies to the West, the Amorites were no longer the dominant power. Their place had been taken by the Hittites. And it is the Khattâ or Hittites, therefore, who in the Assyrian inscriptions, as distinguished from those of Babylonia, are the representatives of Western Syria. On the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser II., now in the British Museum, even Ahab of Israel and Ba’asha of Ammon are included among the ‘kings of the country of the Hittites.’ But of this Assyrian use of the term Hittite there are slight, if any, traces in the Old Testament.[^[28]]

Abram, the Hebrew, first pitched his tent near the future Shechem, under ‘the terebinth of Moreh.’ Moreh is the Sumerian Martu, ‘the Amorite,’ in Hebrew letters; and the fact gives point to the statement which follows immediately, that ‘the Canaanite’—and not the Amorite—‘was then in the land’ (Gen. xii. 6). ‘The mountain of Shechem’ is mentioned in an Egyptian papyrus which describes the travels of an Egyptian officer in Palestine, in the fourteenth century B.C.,[^[29]] but the book of Genesis represents the city as founded only in the lifetime of Jacob (Gen. xxxiv. 6). Hence we are told that it was to ‘the place’ or ‘site’ of Shechem that Abram made his way, not to the town itself. And after the foundation of the town its Canaanite inhabitants are still called Amorites, in accordance with ancient Babylonian custom (Gen. xlviii. 22).